


Ren(egade)

by ReddChaos



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: i think she's neat!, i wanna get to know her!, idk i started thinking about ren and i wanted to explore who and what she was before she met taako
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 16:19:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15867246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReddChaos/pseuds/ReddChaos
Summary: Who was Ren before she met Taako Taaco?  What kind of life did she lead?





	Ren(egade)

She's a Dark Elf.  She doesn't know what that means in the world when she sets out, but she learns a lot of things.  There's a bias, sometimes, and that's as stupid as stupid can be, she thinks, but mostly there's just people.  And people can be anything, she finds.  Nice, rude, charming, villainous, marvelous- so many things, and people can be any and all of them, sometimes at once.  

She lived in a desert town, much like the one she'd settle down in many years into her life journey.  Home wasn't the greatest- homes often aren't, she finds, not just for herself but for anyone- and she wanted to  _know_.  She wanted to  _see_ , and  _learn_ and love, if that was in her stars, and she couldn't  _see_ anything by staying at home.  And since it wasn't the greatest, she set out.  She put it behind her, and honestly?  She didn't look back.

And so she saw and learned and danced and fought and yes, she did love, a couple times, though never enough to stay.  She decided it wasn't for her, and dedicated herself to the other things that drove her out in the world.  

It wasn't until the thirty-fourth year of her travels, when she was one hundred and forty-six years old, that she was sort-of-forced, sort-of-herded into a well put together but nonetheless temporarily set up stadium style of rounded bleachers.  She sits there as it's filled with individuals of all walks of life, elves like and unlike herself, humans, gnomes, dwarves, even a few orcs, and most surprisingly of all, a couple bugbears, who are chatting calmly like any other family might.  

A banner drops as the window to the large, beautifully (if slightly gaudily) decorated caravan opens, sliding out of sight, and a beautiful ( _beautiful_ ) high elf man appears in its place.  He's loud, his voice is strange but charming, and he's got  _flare_.  It doesn't take too long to realize that he's putting on a cooking show, though that fact is hard to catch only for the speed with which he speaks and the blitz of his motions.  So much!  The elf is doing so much on his stage, and she, and everyone else, is captured with delight and interest.

And then he starts doing magic.  

Ren has used magic before, of course.  Her rod is the one symbol of home she's really held onto- a token from her now-estranged mother to protect her on her travels.  She'd even had it engraved with her newly chosen name.  That rod had served as her defense, and that was about it.  It was a tool, a means to an end.  Wave it, say this, get the desired result.  Or don't- magic is fickle after all.

Oh, but this elf.  Magic is his plaything and he wields it like he's breathing, and more than that, the things he  _does_ with it.  It's pointless, all of it, turning ingredients into this and that and then into what it once was or another ingredient he'd already had. It's pointless, but it's so fun and so beautiful.  He speaks his process in the same breath as he tells a joke, flips a pan as he magically transmutes a cloud of powdered sugar into some deep red spice that he throws into that same pan.  It's delightful and amazing and pointless but too, too interesting.  

Ren had never thought of magic as more than a tool.  She knew amazing things could come from it of course, it's fucking magic you guys, but she hadn't considered it in this light at all.  She was clutching the rod with her chosen name in her hand when she'd been guided/pushed here, as the form of defense she'd always, always seen it, but now, sitting in this wooden bleacher, watching this vaguely effeminate wizard elf whip and whirl and practically  _dance_ with magic and food together, she thinks of it as something else.

Her mind is cemented on a decision as small, cheap wood plates piled high with the dish he'd so magically made is handed to her.  Everyone gets one, but she feels like he'd personally handed her her destiny, something she'd never even hoped to find when she'd set out.  She doesn't even have to try it, though of course she does, to know that this?  This is it.  This is what she wants to do.  

She almost cries as she tastes it, and she clamors for his attention afterward, like the entire crowd does, and she doesn't succeed in getting, but she gets his name.  Taako Taaco.  It's painted in lovingly swirled calligraphic letters on that beautiful (if a little gaudy) caravan.  She tracks down a flier, thrown from the top of the vehicle, tossed by Taako himself, though she does have to wrestle it from a gnome woman who tries to snatch it from her hands.  It has his tour outlined on one side, a cheaply reproduced portrait of Taako on the other.

She has no way to keep up with the pace he's set, but that's okay.  She doesn't have to see him again- that's not the point.  She'd hoped maybe she could learn from him, and with the tour and his pace what it is, she definitely can't, but that's okay too.  There's a fire in her heart now.

Food, like magic, had always been a means to an end.  Hungry, eat, feel better.  Wave the rod, speak the words, get the desired effect.  Now both had changed forever.  

She signs up for the first cooking class she can find in the first inn or restaurant that'll accept her.  She lingers on each lesson, trying and failing more than she'd like to admit.  She had never considered food could be so  _difficult_ , but with each failure comes a small victory, a step closer to her desired results, until she succeeds.  It's simple, pasta with a white wine sauce and some array of vegetables thrown in, but she did it.   _She_ did it.  

The master chef isn't quite impressed, and she runs out of funds for the overpriced lessons, but she knows she can do it now.  It's hard, experimenting often ends in failure, but it's too fun, too amazing, and that's without any magic!  She hasn't figured out how to add that in yet, but the fire is stoked anyway.

She wanders for a couple more years, until she wanders into a sweet but miserable little town that has an old, falling apart, unused bar and inn.  With a little bargaining and some help from the people of that town, she turns it into the finest saloon she or any of them have ever seen.  Finally, she has the space to create her way, free of over-the-shoulder judgements from someone who thinks they know better (and honestly probably would), where she can be in charge and in control and learn her way.  

She names it the Davy Lamp, on the first suggestion she receives from a charming kid who looks like she knows a great secret, and it's successful.   _She's_ successful.  People visit her saloon almost daily, and it only takes a few months before her slight accent returns, lost on her travels, but found again here.

It isn't always glamorous, hardly ever, but she's useful, and she's doing what she loves, inspired by that elf who's name she'll never forget.  

Imagine her surprise when he walks through her door with two other nerds.  

It's after the bubble went up.  He shouldn't  _physically_ be able to be here, let alone the fact that he's her hero and he's  _here in her saloon!_   

And then, of course, the hour resets, again and again and again, and when it's all over she remembers and she  _knows_.  Part of her still hurts when the failed banishment is recalled, but the most of her knows it was his attempt at protecting her, and in it's way, it worked.  And she can see him, outside her sweet little town's bubble, for all the seven years after they leave, like a statue of encouragement.  She remembers how he promised to teach her, her dream revitalized in that one loop, and she decides to work on her magic to prove she's worthy of his tutelage.

When he grants her a diploma, she's almost heartbroken.  He says he saw her training and practicing and levelling up (she went up two whole levels, one because she was pretty close anyway, and one because she did a  _lot_ of grinding), but she did that to try to learn from him, not earn some honorary degree!  But sometimes when he and his companions speak, there's no words, only a horrible noise that no mouth could ever make.  She realizes he's more important than a travelling chef, now, and she accepts the diploma with grace.

For the next several months she heavily debates going out after him anyway.  She hangs the diploma in her saloon, though it needed some mild repairs from the attack of the Mother Worm, and she  _is_ proud of it, she tells herself and anyone who asks about it.  Still, it wasn't what she wanted.

For those next several months, she also watched as the world seemed to grow dull.  Her food, despite her best attempts, now much better for all the time, trial, error, and effort she'd made in her life, just didn't taste as good.  Nor did her ale, or her cider or her beer or anything.  Fire wasn't as warm, her favorite color, a deep midnight purple, seemed washed out and almost ugly.  

When the invisible attacks came, she wielded her magic as she once did, as a tool of protection, a weapon.  Even that didn't feel as satisfying, but she protected her home and the town that had come to be her family.  When Paloma insisted they leave town, she was the first to agree.  

When the story and song that made that day survivable hit them, Ren saw the vastness and the strangeness that was her hero's life, and she was all the more amazed.  To be sure, the veneer of idealism at last fell away and she finally, truly saw him as the person he was than as the person she'd made him out to be in her head.  Still, he was her hero, probably more than ever.  When all was said and done, he'd inspired her to be and find her truest self more than anyone else had.  

She returned to Refuge after the Hunger was defeated.  She helped fix it up, she taught June how to run the Saloon, that smart girl who still looked like she held a great secret even though everyone knew it now, and she left.

Her culinary skills were, she'd say, pretty damn good.  Still, she practiced her best dish for weeks before she finally presented it to Taako.  She knew he could be, well, a bit of a dick, if she's being honest, but she knows that if she can just impress him, he'll let her in.  She wants it more than she's ever wanted anything, and she likes to imagine he can taste it in her cooking.  

Ren runs Taako's (actual) Amazing School of Magic, and in turn he teaches her.  She's his second in command, and though she's no longer starstruck by him, she adores him and his and relishes being a part of his world.  

It's not the life she thought she'd live, but it's one she's happy with. Ren is happy as much as anyone is able to be happy.  She finds her place in the world, and she exudes an inner peace, one that marks the life of someone who is and knows exactly where they ought to be.  She cooks, she learns, she even teaches, eventually, and she's happy.  

And that's just the beginning.

 


End file.
